Celebrate International Women’s Day with some mildly sexist slogans
It wouldn’t be International Women’s Day in China without some opportunistic restaurant offering buy-one-get-one-free Mojitos or a major corporation offering a misguided tribute to the sisterhood. We’re off later to attend an all-male government panel on women’s issues but in the meantime, here’s some slogans for International Women’s Day from around the provinces.
As well as paying tribute to a beloved US sitcom, the slogan below has the added benefit of being statistically true—”while most Chinese law firms are filled with male Chinese lawyers, there is a significant portion of female judges in the Chinese judicial system.”
Here’s a nod to Scarface:
It’s a slogan, it’s a chat-up line, it’s a bit of everything:
Eh, no:
This is kinda cute, kinda stalky:
And women hold up half the smoggy sky:
Finally, let’s not forget Girls’ Day, March 7, which fell on Tuesday this year. If you don’t know what Girls’ Day in China is, it supposedly originated at Shandong University in 1986 as a way to celebrate the lives of its unmarried female students (“girls”). Activities today can include a “make-up competition, a hand-make competition, the warmest quail-roost evaluation, and a dancing competition.”
It’s also become an occasion for male students to express their chivalrous appreciation for female peers, though BuzzFeed notes that “many of the banners—even the seemingly innocuous ones—could qualify as sexual harassment” (at worst) or merely patronizing and faintly creepy: “You are the only daughter-in-law my mother specifies,” enthused one banner at the Guanzhou Medical University.
Here’s a poor example being set by China’s second-ranking university:
Happy Women’s Day—to celebrate, there’s a rundown of IWD events in the capital courtesy of the Beijinger.
Cover image from 997788.com